Dr. Thomas Flavin and Dr. Thomas O’Connor, along with their co-author Prof. Abhinav Goyal (UCC), have published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Financial Research. The paper entitled ‘Corporate Governance, Lifecycle and Payout Precommitment: An Emerging Market Study’ analyses how emerging market firms use payout policies across their lifecycles. In contrast to previous studies of U.S. firms, the paper finds strong evidence of precommitment only among relatively well‐governed emerging market firms, who combine good governance with large dividend payouts to shareholders and large debt‐related repayments to creditors. Furthermore, the study also documents a strong precommitment life‐cycle effect. Firms in the growth and mature stages of their life cycle tend to use both debt and dividends to precommit to investors, with an increasing proportion of dividends in total payout measures. A limited version of the paper is available here.